Ajax Girl

Steve Bryant at GoogleWatch shows what the ultra clean Google user interface might look like if they did things the Yahoo way. Not a bad job, and very funny.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74154988/

Google sent an email to JotSpot customers notifying them of an upgrade being rolled out over the next week. JotSpot has been closed to new customers since they were acquired by Google in late October 2006, and there has been no word of when JotSpot might be relaunched.

While the email (copied below) doesn’t say that JotSpot will be relaunching to new customers, it doesn’t make much sense for JotSpot to be upgrading existing customers while they are also in the middle of integrating the software into Google’s overall platform. So, perhaps, JotSpot will be open to all again in the next week or so.

Happy new year! This note is to let you know that all JotSpot wikis
will be upgraded to version 2.9 in the next week. Updates will happen
automatically and no further action is necessary.

Version 2.9 adds several exciting features including support for
Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2. In addition, 2.9 fixes some general
RSS issues and offers RSS feeds for specific applications. Complete
2.9 release notes can be found here:
http://r.vresp.com/?JotSpot/043512d593/816625/812ace81ad/c97cd5e

If you have any questions or if we can provide more information,
please email jotspotsupport@google.com

Regards,
The Google Team

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74124563/

There are rumors that Geoffrey Arone, the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of silicon valley based Flock, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners (one of the original Flock investors). The other co-founder, former CEO Bart Decrem, left Flock late last year.

Flock recently replaced Decrem with a Yahoo veteran, Shawn Hardin. No word on who, if anyone, will replace Arone. Also no word on what new startup Arone will be working on at Bessemer.

Look for a blog post on the official Flock blog soon. Our previous coverage of Flock is here.

Update: This is now confirmed. Arone commented below, saying “I will be working closely with Flock, which is a Bessemer company. I have enjoyed working with Bessemer throughout and this opportunity presented itself. Flock is well-aligned with partners and is burning the midnight oil to get the 1.0 out. My Flock e-mail will still be in tact and if you know any good BD/Strategy folks, send them my way. Cheers, Geoffrey”

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74098430/

I just registered Writeroom, a great “forced focus” writing tool for the Mac. Writeroom basically hides the rest of the screen so you can focus on the words.

What I wanted to write about was the interesting registration process. Registration processes have always interested me.

When you register Writeroom you get an email.

No serial numbers, no codes, just a file. You can either click the file or just drop it on top of the Writeroom app you’ve already downloaded.

Then you see:

All done. The smoothest way to register a product is by paying for the upgrade inside the product. Aside from that method, which Writeroom and most products don’t offer, this is the smoothest and simplest process I’ve experienced in a long time.

Well done. Just like Writeroom.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/191-registering-writeroom

I heard from two independent sources this morning that Amazon, eager to expand their customized product suite after their 2005 acquisition of CustomFlix, is in acquisition discussions with young Seattle-based startup ImageKind.

ImageKind, a 14 person company launched just last August, is a site where artists can upload their work and sell custom framed prints to others. Like CafePress and Zazzle, ImageKind also does a brisk business in one-offs to people who want to upload an image and get a single print. Feedback from the artist community has been very positive about ImageKind to date.

I spoke to the President of ImageKind, Kevin Saliba, who denies the rumor. He says that the company has been in talks with a number of parties around their Series A round of financing, including “large online retailers,” but that the discussions are around an investment, not an acquisition.

ImageKind occupies a niche between current offerings by Art.com and those of Zazzle and CafePress. Art.com is rumored to be soon launching a more customizable product similar to what ImageKind offers today.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74016155/

Habitable software

“Programmers essentially live in the software they create. Therefore, it is a sensible thing to make sure your software is habitable…This speaks to not only writing software that you are proud of, but also rejecting ideas that will compromise the livability of your software while embracing the practices that enhance the livability.”

5 reasons why enthusiasm is better than confidence

“I think the word ‘confidence’ creates more problems than it solves. I usually advise clients to change the word to ‘enthusiasm’. Here’s why…” [via swissmiss]

Tom Asacker summarizes 2007 trend predictions

One thing to look for: “More ‘Jon Stewartizing’ of marketing and PR: Jon Stewart’s ‘Daily Show’ has changed how people consume TV news, getting more from smart comedians on the Comedy Central than the establishment networks’ news broadcasters. Look for more companies to ‘Jon Stewartize’ their Web content, sales meetings, PR programs, similar to what IBM did when it released its hilarious fake mainframe sales training videos on YouTube.”

Wall Street Journal's managing editor talks about the thinking behind the new redesign

“I think we’re now in the environment of continuous change – that if we see an opportunity to gain from change we’ll go for it. There’s nothing that says I’ve done this big thing, don’t talk to me. Maybe you get one day to enjoy the victory in that game, then it’s time to get ready for the next one. You see this particularly on the web.” See the redesign. [via NewsDesigner]

Maggie’s Big Moo highlights

Name something: “If it has a name, your peers can measure it. If it has a name, they can alter it. If it has a name, they can talk about it. And if it has a name, they can eliminate it.” Finish with something remarkable: “Those last five minutes make it easy for your customers to find the difference between you and everyone else.”

In defense of mess

“Messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat ‘office landscapes’) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts.”

24 ways: Photographic Palettes

“Choosing effective colour schemes will always be more art than science, but there are things you can do that will make coming up with that oh-so-smooth palette just a little a bit easier. A simple trick that can lead to incredibly gratifying results lies in finding a strong photograph and sampling out particularly harmonious colours.”

Dictionary.com's top 10 looked-up new words for 2006

Includes conversate, metrosexual, barrista, and queif.

50 Greatest Cartoons

Online video links for the 50 Greatest Cartoons as voted on by the animation industry in 1994. [via cynical-c]

Time: “Apple's New Calling: The iPhone”

“Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn’t and sell it to you for a premium price…Apple also places an inordinate emphasis on interface design. It sweats the cosmetic details that don’t seem very important until you really sweat them. ‘I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to look to make sure every pixel is right,’ says Scott Forstall, Apple’s head of Platform Experience (whatever that is). ‘We will argue over literally a single pixel.’”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/190-sunspots-the-habitable-edition

Cedric Savarese got creative over his winter break and decided to experiment with XUL in HTML.

It shows that you can write XUL UI widgets that degrades gracefully to DHTML widgets in browsers that do not support XUL (IE, Safari, Opera).

This time, I was thinking about the interface for the next version of the Form Builder (I know, somehow it’s always work related) and I was wondering if XUL could be of any help here.

A couple days later, I had this working: tabbed panel example.

• Checkout an example
• View the source code

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/xul-ui-widgets-that-degrade

Seung Chan Lim and his team have been working on research prototypes to make the creation of mashups simple.

JavaScript Dataflow Architecture is the fruits of their labour.

The idea of the research is to allow adhoc assembly of disparate Javascript, HTML and Web services to do rapid
prototyping of Web mash ups. The research artifacts include a small Javascript kernel that allows black box packaging, and a visual IDE that lets users assemble these components quickly.

The motiviation is that Web mash ups are difficult to create for those who are not highly-technical and the process can be cumbersome. Our hope is that using the architecture as well as the tool we can make this much easier and more adhoc.

Check out the demo to see the tool in action.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-dataflow-architecture-mashup-creation-prototype

Mike Keen has created a simple little site that uses Ajax and MooTools effects to deliver free text messages from the web, without the hassle of registration even.

Clean and simple.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ziptophone-free-texting

go2web2, normally an even tempered blog, points out that new startup SuperGu copies everything about Digg except their name and goes off on them a bit. And to add insult to injury, they say it was “inspired by Meneame, Del.icio.us and Reddit,” ignoring Digg completely.

The screen shots do look just about identical - SuperGu hasn’t just copied the Digg idea but the look and feel as well. We’ll see if Digg fires up the lawyers, or turns the other cheek.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/73840274/